Jaron Lanier: How the Internet Failed and How to Recreate It

[Music] hey how are you all any students here is this all this is the the adult okay good good ah good excellent there for you here I'm going to start with some music because some of what I have to talk about is not the most cheerful stuff because our times aren't universally cheerful lately and music is how I survive anyway any of you heard me play this thing okay [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] you will know ladies huh you all know what that is right yeah it's called a cab it's from Laos it's arguably the origin of digital information if you look at it it's got a parallel set of objects that are either offer on there's 16 of them in this one 16-bit number they go back many thousands of years they appear to be older than the abacus in ancient times they were traded across the Silk Route from Asia and were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans the Romans made their own copy which was called a hydrolyse and it was a giant egotistical Roman version that was so big it had to be run on Steam it was operated by teams of slave boys because despite a Festus his best efforts they didn't have computer AI yet and the slave boys couldn't quite operate all the planks that open to close the holes and sink and so they developed this crossbar system and we know about it because there's a surviving hydrolyse believe it or not and that automation evolved along with the hydrolyse in in two directions it turned into the medieval pipe organ and there were player mechanisms on the earliest pipe organs experimentally and it also turned into a family of string instruments that had various assists like the early pre clavichord instruments that eventually evolved as the piano the notion of automating these things was always present so there were always attempts to make player pianos around Mozart's time somebody made a non-deterministic player piano which meant it didn't play exactly the same thing twice Mozart was inspired by that made some music that included dice rolls but another person who was inspired was a guy named jacquard who used the similar mechanism to make a programmable loom that in turn inspired somebody named Charles Babbage to make a programmable calculator and his daughter ada to articulate a lot of ideas about software for the first time and what it meant to be a programmer and then in turn that all inspired a dimm'd fellow named Alan Turing to formalize the whole thing and invent the modern computer so there's a direct line this is it this is the origin of digital information now of course it's not the only line and if I was if I was paid to be a historian I wouldn't have told you that story with such authority and yet I'm not so this is a charming tale it's a happy place to begin it's a it's a reminder that inventions can bring delight and joy and it's part of what I'm a technologist but unfortunately we have some matters to discuss here that are not quite so happy we live in a world that has been darkening lately it's not just a historical lensing effect where it feels worse than ever it's bad in a new way there's something weird going on and I want to begin by trying to distinguish what's going on with our present moment of darkness as compared to earlier times because this is tricky it's almost impossible I think to not be embedded in one's moment in time it's almost impossible not to have illusions due to where you're situated right and so I don't claim to have perfected the art of absolute objectivity at all I'm struggling and I'm sure that I don't have it quite right but I want to share with you my attempts up to this point now the first thing to say is that by many extremely crucial measures we're living in spectacularly good times where the beneficiaries of a steady improvement in the average standard of living in the world we've seen a lowering of most kinds of violence we've seen an improvement in health in most ways and for most people it's actually kind of remarkable in many ways these are really good times and those trend lines go way back over over centuries we've seen steady improvement of societies kind of gotten its act together and we've been able to hold on to a few memories about things that didn't work so we've tried new things we've we've developed relatively more humane societies and relatively better science and better public health and it's amazing it's wonderful it's something that's a precious gift to us from earlier generations that we should be unendingly grateful for and I always keep that in mind I always keep in mind that just in our modern human-made world just the fact you can walk into a building and it doesn't collapse on us is a tribute to the people who made it and the people who funded them and regulated them and the people that taught them there's like this whole edifice of love that's apparent all the time that we can forget about and during times that feel dark one of the antidotes is gratitude and just in these simple things I feel extraordinary gratitude and it reminds me of how overall there's been so much success in the project of Science and Technology it's so easy to lose sight of that and yet there is something really screwy going on that seems to me to be fairly distinct from previous problems it's a new sneaky problem we've brought upon ourselves and we have yet to fully invent our way out of it so what exactly is going on I think at a most fundamental level we've created a way of managing information among ourselves that detaches us from reality I think that is the most serious problem if the only problem was that our technology makes us at times more batty more irritable paranoid more mean-spirited more separated more lonely if that kind of problem was what we were talking about that would be important it would be serious it would be important to address it but what really scares me about the present moment is that I fear we've lost the ability to have a societal conversation about actual reality about things like climate change the need to have adequate food and water for peak population which is coming the need for dealing with changes in the profile of diseases that are coming there's so many so many issues are real they're not just fantasy issues their existential real issues climate above all and the question is are we still able to have a conversation about reality or not that becomes the existential question of the moment and so far the way we've been running things has been pulling us away from reality that scares me and I think that's the core darkness that we have to address we can survive everything else but we cannot survive if we fail to address that now in the title of this lecture I promised a little bit of history how the internet got screwed up or something like that so I'll tell you a bit about that but I want to focus more on trying to characterize this issue a little more tightly and trying to explain at least my thoughts on how to remedy it and maybe some other people's thoughts to try to give you a bit of a sense of it now to begin with one of the infuriating aspects of our current problem is that it was well foreseen in advance that's the thing about it nobody can claim that they were surprised and I can point to many folks who were talking about this in advance I'm good as good a starting place as any is to talk about iam foresters story the machine stops who here has read it ok well a few people terrifying right all right the machine stops was written I believe in 1907 is that right it might have been on nine but you know a century in a decade ago or so and it foresees a world remarkably like ours it's a world and this was written well before touring well before any of this stuff I mean before there was computation and it describes a world of people in front of their screens interacting social networking doing search and getting lost in a bunch of stupid and finally when the Machine experiences a crash there's this calamity on earth and people become so dependent on it that the loss of this machine becomes a calamity in itself and at the very end of the book people are crawling out from their screens and looking at the real world and saying oh my god the Sun and it's like this it's a really amazing piece because it's possibly the most prescient prints prescient thing that's ever been written at all it was written in part as a response to the techie utopianism of the day it was a response to writers like HG Wells saying wait a second these are still gonna be people we have to think about what this will mean to people it's often the case that the first arrived or on a scene has a clearer view and can have this kind of lucidity that later people find it very difficult to achieve and I think something like that happens very long ago but then honestly we could talk about Touring's last writing just before his suicide where he was realizing that even though he played as great a role as anyone in defeating fascism he hadn't defeated fascism at all because here he was being destroyed for his identity you all know the story of trade by now it's not obscure anymore there was a movie and everything for a long time I would speak to computer science classes nobody knew about Turing's death at all which is a scandal but at this point I think everyone knows and if you read his final writings you read this kind of in a way an inner glow of somebody who does have some kind of a faith and some kind of a stronger Center but also this kind of sense of defeat and by the way it's within the context of that that he invented artificial intelligence that he invented the Turing test and this notion of this person who would transcend this non person who could transcend so sexuality and be just this pristine abstract platonic being an escaped oppression perhaps but anyway so we have that in the immediate early generation of computer scientists we had Norbert Wiener who here has read Norbert Wiener I don't see a single young person's hand up at unfold if you're young if you're a student and you haven't read any of these people would you please correct that and read them seriously you'll you'll be so happy if you take this advice and actually read these people so Norbert wieners one of the very first computer scientists first generation and he wrote books that were incredibly president about this he wrote a book called the human use of human beings and he pointed out if you could attach a computer to input and output devices interacting with a person you could get algorithms that would enacted adaptive behaviors technologies to take control of the person and he viewed this as this extraordinary moral failure that to be avoided and he has this thought experiment at the end of the book Reese's well you could imagine kind of global system where everybody would have devices on them attached to such algorithms that would be manipulating them in ways they couldn't quite follow and this would bring humanity to a disastrous end but of course this is only a thought experiment no such thing is feasible because there wouldn't be enough bandwidth on the radio waves and all this you know he then explained why it couldn't be done and of course we built exactly the thing he warned about I could give many other examples I worked on it myself in 92 I wrote an essay describing how a little AI BOTS could create fake social perception in order to confuse people and throw elections big deal lots of people were prescient about this this wasn't a surprise we knew and that's the thing that's so depressing there was a lot of good cautionary science fiction there were a lot of good cautionary essays they were good cautionary technical writings and we ignored all of it we ignored it all how could that have happened so I um I would rather tell the story about how everybody was surprised and a lot of people who are entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were surprised but only because they don't like reading don't be like them so the social history of how everything screwed up is a reasonable way to talk about the particular way in which it screwed up so I'm gonna give it a try the first thing to say is that in the generation of media technologists and artists and viewers from immediately before computation went pop in like the 60s into the 70s into the 80s some of the personality dysfunctions and some of the craziness was already apparent we started to see this notion that anybody could be a celebrity and people became obsessed with this idea that maybe I could be one and maybe there's something wrong with me if I'm not this kind of mass media insecurity obsession thing I it's hard to trace the moment when this personality dysfunction really hit the mainstream and really started to darken the world we were talking earlier actually about what moment to choose I was thinking actually the assassination of John Lennon because here you had somebody who basically just wanted to be famous for being able to be a killer a random killer and that was a little new if you look at crappy evil people earlier sure there was someone to be famous I don't know Bonnie and Clyde or something like that but there are a few different things about them one thing is that they were also stealing money there was a kind of a way in which they were I don't know there was some kind of a part of a system they had peers they weren't they weren't typically total loners the most typical profile of really evil person before was actually a hyper conformist the typical Nazi was actually somebody who didn't want to stand out who just was going with the flow and it and fully internalized the the social milieu around them and because it felt normal and that's that's been a much more typical way that people behaved appallingly in history this this sort of weird loner celebrity seeker thing I'm sure it existed before but it's starting to become prominent I I want to say something I've never said publicly before but it's just been gnawing at me for many years I'm old enough to have had some contact back in the day with both Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol who were two figures who had a kind of a loose way of talking about this early but they didn't condemn it they just stood aloof and said oh we're super smart and wise for being able to see this happening and what they should have done as they should have said this is and I it's actually really been bothering me I've never said that before I feel it should be said because once again the first people on the scene sometimes have a kind of a vision and they should be judgmental about it the way M Forster was and I feel like they maybe failed us morally at that point because they saw it better than a lot of other people maybe than anybody at that time anyway that's maybe not useful to say now but at some point it has to be said let's fast forward a little bit computation starts to get cheap enough that it's starting to creep out of the lab this is the early 1980s and here we hit another juncture there was this thing that happened oh man I was right there for it it was the birth of the open free software idea there was a friend of mine named Richard Stallman any chance Richards here no I guess not anyway you never know once no I stopped at things anyway Richard had this horrible he like one day he just art saying oh my god Mike my girlfriend's been killed like my lovers been killed I said oh my god that's horrible but what it really was was the software system he'd been working on for this kind of computer and what had happened is it had gone into a commercial mode where the companies and I think all the lists machine which would probably nobody remembers anymore a sort of early attempt to make an AI specialized computer and he he was upset he said he sort of melded his anger about this with a kind of an anti-capitalist feeling said no software must be free it must be just the thing that's distributed it can't be property property is theft and it really spoke to a lot of people it melded with with these other ideas that were going on at the time and so it became this kind of feeling I would say sort of a leftist feeling that was profound and remains to this day a lot of times if somebody wants to do something useful with tech they'll have to put in the word open-source lately they also have to put in blockchain and so very typically it's open source it's got blockchain and then then you know it's good so there was this other thing going on which is this feeling that the purpose of computers was to hide and that's that deserves a little bit of explanation they were America has always had this divide this red-blue divide or whatever remember it used to be north-south divide we we but we fought one of history's horrible Wars once is a civil war and so people on what we'd call now the red side of the divide were very upset there was a Democratic president named Jimmy Carter that a few people other mean the room might be old enough to remember and there was a period when there was an Arab oil embargo and we did we had long lines at gas stations and he imposed a 55 mile an hour speed limit on the freeways which a lot of people really hated because I wanted to drive fast and so this thing sprang up called CB radio and CB radios were these little analog radios you'd install in your car and you'd create a false persona a handle and then you'd warn other people about where the police were hiding so that you could all drive fast collectively by sharing information and it was all anonymous he could never trace it and this thing was huge this hat is higher profile at the time as Twitter does today probably there were songs celebrating it was a really big deal but then on the left side of America on the blue side people also wanted to hide and in that case there were two things going on one is the draft hadn't quite died down and it was still the Vietnam era and that was just terrifying because people didn't really believe in that war and the idea of being drafted into this horribly violent war that appeared to have no good purpose just absolutely broke people's hearts and terrified people so they wanted to hide and a lot of people did and then there was marijuana and the drug laws and a lot of people really were hiding from those as well so you basically had both red and blue America feeling like the number one priority for freedom for goodness is to be able to hide from the government so encryption and hiding and fake personas became this celebrated thing so this in this milieu there was this idea that online networking which didn't really exist yet I mean we had networks but they were all very specialized and isolated there wasn't a broad internet you know there would be this idea that everything would be free and open everything would be anonymous and it'd just be like this giant black weird place where you everything you never knew anything but you were also free and nobody could find you mmm okay so that was that was this starting idea so there were a few other things that fed into it another thing was that there was a famous rock band called the Grateful Dead that encouraged people to tape their songs and didn't care about privacy and all this there are all these different factors now all this was going on and then simultaneously this other thing happened which is we started to have the figure of the glorified practically superhuman tech entrepreneur and these were in the 80s they but these were figures like Steve Jobs Bill Gates people we still remember of course bill still with us and they were just worshipped they were the coolest people ever well around around here in California people hated Bill but they loved Steve and there was this kind of interesting problem which is we not we didn't just like our to controvert entrepreneurs we made them into sort of superhuman figures the the phrase dent the universe is associated with jobs it's this notion that there's this this kind of meet Chien super power to create the flow of reality to direct the future because you are the tech entrepreneur and computation is reality and and the way we said these architectures will create future societies and that'll ultimately change the shape of the universe once we get even greater powers over physics and there was just like this no end to the fantastical thinking we were at the birth point for every form of absolute God like you know immortality and shape-shifting and every crazy thing I was a little bit of that I'm sorry to say I was I kind of got a loft I was pretty intense in the 80s myself but anyway there was this feeling that the entrepreneur could just just like was had more look power than the average person okay so now here you have a dilemma that had been kind of sneaking up and nobody had really faced it on the one hand everything's supposed to be free everything's supposed to be anonymous everything is supposed to be like this completely open thing but on the other hand we love our entrepreneurs we worship our entrepreneurs the entrepreneurs are inventing reality so it should be clear that there's a bit of a potential conflict here everything must be free but we worship entrepreneurs how do we do it how do we do it how do we do it and so a set of compromises were created over the years that ended up giving us the worst of both sides of that I would say so I'll give you the the story is is long and interesting but I'll give you just a few highlights one thing that happened is when we finally got around to actually creating the Internet we decided it has to be super bare-bones it would represent machines because without having a number representing a machine you can't have an Internet but it wouldn't represent people it didn't intrinsically have accounts built in for humans it had no storage for humans built in it had no transactions it had no authentication it had no persistence of information guaranteed it had no historical function we had it was like super bare-bones just this thing connects with that thing that's all it did and the reason why was that we were supposed to leave room for future entrepreneurs those who we worshiped you know the Internet so if I was about to say the Internet as you know was invented by Al Gore some of you would laugh and that's because it was a laugh line for a while because he was a democratic he was a vice president and before that a senator from Tennessee and he was accused of over claiming that he'd invented the internet on a TV show which didn't happen however I think he should claim it I think he did invent it he didn't invent it technologically not at all all of the underlying stuff which is called a packet switch network and a few other elements that existed in lots of instances from before he had this idea of throwing some government money into it to bribe everybody to become interoperable so they'd just be one damn network and people could actually now that really was him and he deserves credit for having done that unless you think it was a terrible idea but when that was happening I remember having conversations about it's like we by creating this thing in such an incredibly bare-bones way we are creating gifts of hundreds of billions of dollars for persons unknown who will be required to fill in these missing things that everybody knows have to be filled in and then a little while later this other thing happened which is Tim berners-lee who's great came up with a world wide web protocol and here he did this thing up to that point all of the ideas for how to create shared you know shareable media experiences online which are called hypertext after Ted Nelson had come up with the first Network design back in 1960 the HTTP is from is for hypertext they a core tenet of these is at any time one thing on the Internet pointed at something else that other thing had to know it was being pointed at so that there were two-way links you always knew who was pointing at you and the reason for that is that way you could preserve context provenance history you could create chains of payment where if people mashed up stuff from somebody else than that person mashing up from somebody else you could create payments that would populate back to pay for everybody who contributed so if you wanted to have an economy of information you could the information wouldn't be job but Tim just had one way links you could point it somebody they had no idea they were being pointed out and the reason for that is that it's just to actually do the two-way links is genuinely a pain in the butt it's just more work if you do one way links the whole thing could spread a lot faster anybody can do it it's just a much easier system and that embedded in it not only this idea of virality or me meanness where whatever can spread the fastest is what wins and so it was a quantity over quality thing in my view that was another thing that happened so another thing that happened didn't come from Silicon Valley in the late 80s people in Wall Street started to use automated trading first flash crash from out of control trading algorithms was 89 and they figured out something very basic although EM Forster had described exactly this problem so much earlier which is that if you had a bigger computer than everybody else and it was more central getting more information you could calculate ahead of everybody and gain an information advantage and in economics information advantages everything so if you had just a little bit more information on everybody else you could just turn that into money and it wasn't really new insight that it had actually been implemented before then shortly after that a company called Walmart realized they could apply that not just to financial instruments to investments but to the real world and they created a software model of their supply chain and dominated it they could go to anybody who was involved somewhere in giving them products and figure out what their bottom line was so they could negotiate everybody down they knew who everybody's competitor was they went into every negotiation with superior information when they built this giant retail empire on information superiority Dada all happened before anybody in Silicon Valley started doing it okay now fast-forward to the birth of Google so you have these super bright kids Sergey and Larry some of the students I talked to today on campus here remind me of what they were like at the same age super bright super optimistic idealistic actually focused and they were backed into a corner in my view on the one hand the whole hacker community the whole tech community would it just slam them if they did anything other than everything being free but on the other hand everybody wanted them to be the next Steve Jobs the next Bill Gates that was like practically a hunger like we want we want our next star and the only way to combine the two things was the advertising model the advertising model would say you'll get everything for free you can be you know as far as you're concerned your experience is you just ask for what you want and we give it to you now the proof of that is that because it's an advert thing you're actually being observed your information is being taken you're being watched and there's a true customer this other person off to the side who at first you were always aware of because you could see their little ads you know they're like if your local dentist or whatever it was cute at first was harmless at first and unfortunately if they come up with this thing after I don't know Moore's law had ended in computers were as fast as they were ever gonna get and we'd established a whole regulatory and ethical substrate for computation everything maybe it could have worked but instead they did it in a period where there was still a whole lot of Moore's law to happen so all the computers got faster and faster cheaper and cheaper more more plentiful more and more storage one more connection the algorithms got better and better machine learning kind of started to work a little better a lot of these algorithms kind of kind of figured it out we had enough computation to do experiments and get all kinds of things working that haven't worked before all kinds of little machine vision things I sold them on machine vision company actually and the whole thing kind of accelerated and what started out as an advertising model turned into something very different and so here we get into our description of at least my perception of the state that we're in right now so I mentioned earlier that Norbert Wiener had described what he viewed as a potentially horrible outcome for the future of computation where you'd have a computer in real-time observing the person with sensors and providing stimulus to that person in some form of displays or other effectors and implementing behavior modification feedback loops in order to influence the person and if that was done globally it would detach humanity from reality and bring our species to an end that was the fear back in the 50s now unfortunately this innocent little advertising model which was supposed to address both the desire to have everything be this Wild West open thing and the desire to have entrepreneurs despite everything being free landed us right in that pocket that's exactly where we went now I should say a bit about behaviorism because that's another historical thread that led to where we are behaviorism is a discipline of reducing the number of variables in the training of an organism so that you can compose them rigorously and reproduce effects so let's say if you're whispering into your horses ear while you're training your horse that's not behaviorism if you're whispering into your kids ear even if you do offer some treats once in a while to encourage behavior that's not behaviorism it has elements of it but hardware behaviors and reduces the variables and says look what we want to do if you want to isolate we want to say here's this organism it's in a box sometimes they're called Skinner boxes remembering BF Skinner one of the famous behaviorists and we want to say if the creature person human whatever does a certain thing you want you give the person the treat does something you don't want give them a punishment typically maybe candy and electric shock the timing and the occurrence of these things is guided by an algorithm you find him the algorithm we need to discover how to change behavior patterns this science of studying behavior behaviorism yielded surprises really interesting surprises very early on the first celebrity behaviorist was probably Pavlov you've all heard of Pavlov I'm sure and he demonstrated famously that he could get a dog to salivate upon hearing a bell whereas previously the dogs salivated upon being given food and hearing the bell so he was able to create a purely symbolic seeming stimulus to replace the original concrete one that's quite important because in many areas today where behaviors modified addictions are created there only abstract stimuli this is true for instance for gambling's that modern gambling is based on this so are like little games like candy crush for their pictures of candy instead of real candy now I have no doubt someday there'll be some Facebook or Google hovercraft you know drone over your head that drops real candy and electric shocks on your head but for the moment we're in this symbolic realm that that pavlova covered another amazing result is that you might think naively that's simply providing punishment and reward as reliably and as immediately as possible would be the most effective way to change behavior patterns but actually that's not true it turns out that adding an element of randomness makes the algorithms more effective so we don't fully just to state the obvious nobody really understands the brain as yet but it appears that the brain is is constantly in a natural state of seeking patterns of trying to understand the world so if you provide a slightly randomized feedback pattern it it doesn't confuse or repel the brain instead it draws the brain in the brain is thinking there must be something more to understand there must be something more and gradually you're drawn and more and more and more and so this is why the randomness of when you win at gambling is actually part of the addiction algorithm that's part of what makes it happen now in the case of social media what happens is the reward is when you get retweeted or you go viral something like that the term of art in Silicon Valley companies is usually a dopamine hit which is not an entirely accurate description but it's the one that that's most commonly is for when you have a quick rise of a positive reward but just as the gambler becomes addicted to the whole cycle where they're losing more often than they win a Twitter addict gets addicted to the whole cycle where they're most often being being punished by other people who are tweeting and they only get a win once in a while right it's the same it's the same algorithm and indeed one of the side effects so in the trade the terminology we use is engagement we have algorithms that drive engagement and we hire zillions of people with recent PhDs from psych departments this whole program there's a program called persuasive technology at Stanford where you can go get a PhD in this and then you get hired by some tech company to drive engagement but it's it's really just a sanitized word for addiction so we drive addiction using a variety of these algorithms and we can study them more than the classical behavior server did because we can study 100 million instances at once and and and we can put out a hundred million variations and all kinds of people and correlate it with data for all those people and then cycle and cycle in a cycle the algorithms can find new pockets of efficacy they can tweak themselves until they work better and we don't even know why they're far ahead of any ability we have to really keep up with them and try to interpret exactly why some things work better than other things now even so it's important to get this right the effect is in a way not that dramatic so Facebook for instance has published research bragging that it can make people sad and they don't realize that they were made sad by Facebook now by the way you might wonder why would Facebook publish that wouldn't they want to hide that fact it sounds pretty bad but you have to remember that you're not the customer of Facebook the customer is the person off to the side we've created a world in which any time two people connect online it's financed by a third person who believes they can manipulate the first two so to the degree face what can can convince that the third party that mysterious other who's hoping to have influence that they can have some mystical magical unbounded sneaky form of influence then Facebook makes more money that's why they published it and I've been at events where this stuff is sold by the various tech companies and they there's and to the brags and the exaggerations when it comes to telling the true customers what their powers are very different from their public stance but at any rate the the the darkness of this all is that when you use this technique to addicted people and we haven't even gotten to the final stage of influencing their behavior patterns we're still just at the first stage of getting them addicted you create personality dysfunctions associated with addiction because it is a form of behavioral addiction so if any of you have ever dealt with somebody who's a gambling addict the technical qualities of gambling addiction are similar to the technical qualities of social media addiction now I was just saying before that we have to get this right and understand the the degree of awfulness here because it's actually kind of slight but just very consistent and distributed a gambling addiction can be really ruinous somebody can destroy their lives and their family a social media addiction can be ruinous as we've seen by unfortunate events in just the last few days but more often there's a statistical distribution where a percentage of people are kind of slightly effective and have their personality slightly changed so what will happen is some percentage and in some of the studies I've seen published maybe it's like 5% show like a 3% change in personality or something like that so and this is over hundreds of millions of people or even over billions so it's a very slight very distributed statistical effect on people with just a few who are really dramatically affected but the problem with that is that it compounds like compound interest a slight effect that's persistent consistent repeated starts to darken the whole society so let's talk a little bit about the addictive personality that's brought out by these things the way I characterize it is it becomes paranoid insecure a little sadistic it becomes cranky now why why those qualities so I have a hypothesis about this and here I'm hypothesizing a little ahead of experimental results in science so I want to make that clear this is a conjecture not not something that I can cite direct evidence for what I but but all the this the components of it are all well studied so it's just putting together things that are known and I think I think this should therefore be worthy of public discussion you can very roughly bundle emotional responses from people into two kind of bins one will call positive and the other will call negative the positive ones are things like affection trust the optimism and a person belief in a person faith in a person comfort with a person relaxing around a person all that kind of stuff the qualities you want to feel in yourself when you're dating somebody let's say the negative ones are things like fear anger jealousy rage feeling aggrieved feeling a need for revenge just all this stuff now in the negative bin a lot of these emotions are similar to another bin that's been described over many years which is the startle responses or the fight-or-flight responses and the thing about these negative ones is that they rise quickly and they take a while to fall so you can become scared really fast you can become angry really fast and the related positive emotions tend to rise more slowly but can can drop quickly they have the reverse time profile so it takes a long time to build trust but you can lose trust very quickly it takes a long time to become relaxed prepare to how quickly you can becomes startled scared and nervous and on edge no this isn't universally true there are some fast rising positive emotions I just talked about the dopamine hits earlier so that's an exception but overall they're more fast rising negative ones now these algorithms that are measuring you all the time in order to adapt the customized feeds that you see and the designs of the ads that you see and just everything about your experience they're watching you watching you watching you in a zillion ways expanding all the time now they're following your voice tone and trying to discern things about your emotions based on pure correlation without necessarily much theory behind it they're watching your motions as you move they're watching your eyes your smile and of course they're watching what you click on what you type all that and the thing is if you have an emotional response that's faster the algorithms are going to pick up on it faster because they're trying to get as much speed as possible they're rather like high-frequency trading algorithms in that sense we intrinsically in Silicon Valley try to make things that respond quickly and act quickly and so if you have a system that's responding to the fast rising emotions you'll tend to catch more of the negative ones you'll tend to catch more of the startled emotions now here's the thing if you look at the literature and ask the broad question if we accept this idea of beaming emotions into positive and negative feedback emotions as far as behavior change goes is positive or negative more influential on human behavior and the answer you'll get is a really complex patchwork there's behaviors have been around for a long time so there's a lot of studies you can read hard to know exactly how high quality all the research is especially the older stuff but in general you can find lots of examples of positive feedback working better than negative or vice versa and it's all very situational a lot of it's very subtle on how things are framed for people all kinds of stuff but overall I what I perceive from the literature is an approximate purity between positive and negative but if you ask which emotions will the algorithms pick up on when they're trying to get the fastest possible feedback it's unquestionably true that the negative ones are faster all right so what you see is the algorithm suddenly flagging oh my god I got a rise out of that person let's do some more of that because we're engaging that person and that stuff tends to be the stuff that makes them angry paranoid revengeful insecure nervous jealous all these things and so what you see is this feedback cycle where a certain kind of dysfunctional personality trait is brought out more and more and people with similar dysfunctional personalities are introduced to each other by the system's so when it's a personality look like well the the addiction personality online I'll name three people who have recently displayed it rather blatantly one is the president who I'm just not going to bother to name because I'm sick of the idiot the second is Kanye the third is Elon Musk three people all displaying somewhat overlapping in my view personality distortions now I've no I've had slight contact with two of the above three I'll let you guess which two they are well no I'll say one of them is trouble I've met Trump a few times over a very long period of time I've never known him well I've never had a real conversation with him but I will say that in the 80s and 90s he didn't seem like somebody who was desperate for you to like him he didn't seem like somebody who was nervous about what he thought about him he didn't seem like somebody who was itching for a fight he didn't seem like somebody who was looking for trouble and thought it would help he really just didn't seem like that at all he seemed I think he was still a conman I think he was but he was kind of like a happy conman is that you know it's like a different persona and and I think what you know remember how I said before that the gambling addict is addicted to the whole cycle where they lose a lot before they win and I think in the same way the Twitter addict is addicted to a cycle where they bring a lot of wrath upon themselves and have to deal with a lot of negative feedback before they get positive feedback or that you know there's a mix it's it's very much like the losing and winning and gambling and so I think what's happened is he's gotten himself into this state where he's he's like this really nervous narcissist and this is kind of weird like this personality of the person who really liked this Putin really liked me I think he likes me this kind of weird nervous narcissistic insecure person has not been a typical authoritarian personality in the past and yet it's working now and I suspect the reason why is a lot of the followers who respond to it see themselves in that insecurity which is really strange I mean if you think about this in the past the celebrity figure or the leader typically wanted to display a personality that was kind of invulnerable and an aloof and unmeaning self-sufficient uncaring about whether whether they're liked or not and yet that's not what's going on here it's really strange and and then there's this issue of lashing out its it be so so it's it's as if because you know that you have to get a certain there's a certain amount of punishment that goes with that reward you actually seek out some of the punishment because you're oh that's actually a part of your addiction so if you're a gambling addict you actually make some stupid bets it's it's it's true it's just what happens so you have Elon Musk I'm calling this guy who tried to rescue kids in a cave in Thailand a pedophile out of nowhere all right same thing twitter twitter addiction dysfunctional personality Kanye I'm not even what you know but but basically you have people who are kind of degrading themselves and making themselves into fools but in a funny way in the current environment there's a whole world of addicted fans who actually relate to it see themselves in it and it works it works for the first time in history and it's really strange it's really it's a really weird moment okay so I started by talking about the problem of losing touch with reality now as you heard I have a book called ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now and it goes through a lot of reasons to delete your social media of which the closest to my heart is actually the final one which is a spiritual one it's about how I think that Silicon Valley is kind of creating a new religion to replace old religions and even atheism with this new faith about AI and the superiority of tech and how we're creating the future and all this and and I feel that that religion is an inferior one and people are being drawn into it through practice so that that tenth argument is what I care most about but what I want to focus on here is the existential argument which is the loss of reality so the problem we have here is that we've created so many addicts so many people who are on edge that they perceive essentially politics before they perceive nature they perceive the world of human recriminations before they perceive actual physical reality know I presented a theory it's in various of my books called the packs which which I will recount to you now that's a way of thinking about this it goes like this there's some species that are intrinsically social like a lot of ants there's some species that tend to be solitary like a lot of octopuses which is some of my favorite animals there are some species that can switch that can be either solitary or social depending on circumstances and a famous one that we refer to in mythology and aamir storytelling is the wolf you could have a wolf pack or you can have a lone wolf same wolves different social structures different different epistemology I would say when you're a lone wolf you're responsible for your own survival you have to pay attention to your environment where will you find water where will you find prey how do you avoid being attacked where do you find shelter how do you survive bad weather you are attached to reality like a scientist or like an artist you are a naturalist when you're in a Wolf Pack different story now you have to worry about your peers they're competing with you you have to worry about those above you in the pack will they trash you will you get their station you have to piss on those below you because you have to maintain your status but you have to unify with all your fellow pack members to oppose those other packs over there the other so all of a sudden social perception and politics has replaced naturalism politics versus naturalism those are the epistemologies of the lone wolf and the wolf pack people are also variable in exactly this way we can function as individuals or we can function as members of a pack now what happens is exactly what I am at least hypothesizing happens with wolves it's been kind of interesting interaction interacting with scientists to actually study wolves because I haven't actually spent that much time with wolves just a little bit so they're people who know a lot more about wolves and let's just say my little portrayal is overly simplified but just I mean I'm it's like a little cartoon but I hope it functions to communicate so when we are thinking as individuals we have a chance to be naturalist so we have a chance to be scientists and artists we have a chance to perceive reality uniquely from our own unique perspective a diverse perspective as compared to everyone else is that we can then share when we join into a pack mentality we perceive politics so what happens on social media is because the algorithms are trying to get a rise out of you to up your engagement and make you ripe for receiving behavior modification you're constantly being pricked with little social anxiety rage irritations all these little things all these little status worries is my life as good as that person's life and my lonely relative to all these people what do they think of me am i smart enough am I getting enough attention for this why didn't people care about the last thing I did online blah blah blah blah and there's like it's not that any of these things by themselves are necessarily that serious but cumulatively what they're doing is they're shifting your mindset and suddenly you're thinking like a packed feature you're so the pack switch is set and you're thinking politically and when you think politically you lose naturalism you know I think both modes of being have a place I think being I think if people exclusively all the time stayed in the lone setting that would be bad for society that would be bad for relationships would be bad for families and so on however there needs to be a balance there needs to be a healthy way of going back and forth between them and not getting lost in one or the other and so the hypothesis I'd put forward is that we're giving people so many little anxiety-producing bits of feedback that we're getting them into this pack mentality where they've become hyper political without maybe even quite realizing it and losing touch with reality no when I say losing touch with reality that demands some evidence because you might say well are we less in touch than in the past so remember at the start after the music I gave you what I consider to be sort of a positive framing and a lot of good news absolute poverty has been reduced absolute levels of violence have been reduced absolute levels of disease have been reduced and so on there are many ways in which we're bettering ourselves but there's this other thing going on which is bad enough that it might be the undoing of all of that and that is this loss of reality now here's what I want to point out I have allah round a fair amount and i visited places that would appear on the surface to have very little in common i'll mention some of them Brazil Sweden Turkey Hungary the United States what do they all have in common what they have in common is the rise not just whe symptoms characterize it as right-wing populist politics I don't think that's quite right I think what we actually are seeing is the rise of cranky paranoid unreal politics I think that's the better characterization and it's really remarkable how it's all happened at about the same time and it's happened in some poor parts of the world too it's not even it's like so it's an you could say well it's something about agent populations all the cranky old people I have you know freshmen will tell me that to get our minor but you know their countries that are very young that have that problem Turkey Brazil it's like oh it's diverse countries it's that we can't have democracies unless they're they're ethnically monolithic or something brazil's diverse oh it's uh it's inequality we can't have the problem is that societies are just losing their social safety net well you know Sweden Germany not really they might have anxiety about actually you know it's it's not so all these places are really different they have different histories and yeah they've all had similar dysfunctions and so you have to say well what's in common between all of them and you can see something big well they'll have anxiety about the future and this that's true but the obviously they have in common is that people have moved to this mode of connecting through manipulative systems that are designed for the benefit of third parties who hope to manipulate everybody sneakily that seems like the clear thing they all have in common Brazil recently I mean all the same crap that we saw was happening on whatsapp which is the big connector down there and Facebook I think to their credit try to help a little bit but they couldn't really do it because the whole system is designed to be manipulative you know it's if if if you have a Carta that that's designed to roll it's very hard to say well we won't let it roll very much I mean whatever it does it'll be rolling if you have a manipulation system and that's what it's designed for you can try to get it to roll more slowly or something but all it can really do is manipulate that is what these things are optimized for that's what they're built for that's how they make money every penny of the many billions of dollars that some of these companies have taken in that are totally dependent on this and of the big companies the only ones really totally dependent are Google and Facebook or almost solely dependent it all comes from people who believe they'll be able to sneakily influence somebody else by paying money via these places that is what they do there's just no other way to describe it and so you have the typical thing that happens is that the algorithms there isn't any information in them that comes from like angels or extraterrestrials it all has to come from people so people input some information and often it's very positive at first you know it'll a lot of the starter information that goes into social networks ranges from extremely positive and constructive and constructive to just neutral and nothing much so there might be people who are trying to better themselves maybe they're trying to help each other with health information or something like that then all this information starts they'll say well we're gonna forward some this information to this person in that person we'll try a ten million times and we'll see if we get a rise from anybody that ups their engagement now the people who will be engaged quote-unquote engaged are the ones who dislike that information so all of a sudden you're getting juice from finding exactly the horrible people who hate whatever the positive people started off with and so this is why you see this phenomenon over and over again where whenever somebody finds a great way to use a social network they have this initial success and then it's echoed later on but horrible people getting even more mileage out of the same stuff so you start with an Arab Spring and then you get Isis getting even more mileage out of the same tools you start with black lives matter you get these horrible racists these horrible people who just are blackening America getting even more mileage out of the same tools it just keeps on happening and by the way you start with me too and then you get in cells and proud boys and whatever the next stupid things gonna be because the algorithms are finding these people as a matter of course introducing them to each other and then putting them in feedback loops where they get more and more incited without anybody planning it there's no evil person sitting in a cubicle intending this I or at least I would be very surprised to find somebody like that I know a lot of the people in the different places and I just don't believe it I believe that we backed ourselves into this weird corner and we're just not able to admit it and so we're just kind of stuck in this stupid thing where we keep on doing this to ourselves so what you end up with is electorates that are driven you have like enough of a percentage of people who are driven to be a little cranky and paranoid and a little irritated and they might have legitimate reasons I'm not saying that they're totally disconnected from real life complaints but their way of framing it is based on whatever the algorithms found could be forwarded to them that would irritate them the most which is a totally different criteria than reality so whatever it is and so if it's in the case of the synagogue shooter it was one set of in the case of the pipe bomber guy was another thing in the case of the guy who set up the but it's all similar it's all part of the same brew of stuff that algorithms forward now in some cases the algorithms might have tweaked the messages a bit because the algorithms can do things like play with fonts and colors and timing and all kinds of parameters to try to if those have a slight effect of how much of rise they can get but typically they come from people who are also just trying to get as much impact as possible and I think what's happened is we've created a whole world of people who think that it's honorable to be a terribly socially insecure nitwit who feels that the world is against them and it's desperate to get attention in any way and if they can get that attention that's the ultimate good and the president acts that way a lot of people act that way that's what musk was doing and I could many other figures and I think what happens is these people become both the source of new data that furthers the cycle and of course it drives them and so that there's sort of multiple levels of evil that result from this the obvious one is these horrible people who make our world unsafe and make it make our world violent and break our hearts and just keep on doing it over and over again and this just off this sense that just random people or self radicalizing and turning themselves into the top of the most awful version of a human imaginable but there aren't that many of them in absolute numbers and I said into earlier in terms of absolute amounts of violence there's actually an overall decrease in the world despite all this horrible stuff with some notable exceptions like in with Isis in the Middle East and so forth but overall you know actually that's that's true however the second evil is the one that I think actually threatens our overall survival and that is the one of gradually making it impossible to have a conversation about reality it's really become impossible to have a conversation about climate it's become impossible to have a conversation about health it's become impossible to have a conversation about poverty it's become impossible to have a conversation about refugees it's become impossible to have a conversation about anything real it's only become possible to have conversations about what the algorithms have found upsets people and on the terms of upsetting because that's the only thing that's allowed to matter and that is terribly dark that is terribly dark and terribly threatening and when I the scenario I worry about is I mean it's conceivable that some sort of repeat of what happened it's hard for me to even say this but some sort of repeat of what happened in the late 30s in Germany could come about here I can imagine that scenario I can imagine it vividly because my own grandfather waited too late in Vienna and my mother was taken as a child and survived the concentration camp so I feel it's very keenly having a daughter myself and yet I don't think that's the most likely bad scenario here I think the more likely bad scenario is that we just put up with more and more shootings more and more absolutely useless horrible people becoming successful and one in one theater and other whether politicians or company heads or entertainers or whatever and gradually we don't address the climate gradually we don't address where we're gonna get our fresh water from gradually we don't address where we're gonna get a new antibiotics from gradually we don't wonder how we're gonna stop the spread of viruses vaccine paranoia is another one of these stupid things that spread through these channels gradually we see more and more young men everywhere turning themselves into the most jerky version of a young man sort of various weenie suppress supremacy movements under different names from you know gamergate to in cells to albright - Cowboys - whatever this is going to be like this endlessly and then gradually one day it's too late and we haven't faced reality and that and we're we no longer have agriculture we no longer have our coastal cities we no longer have a world that we can survive in and I that is you know it's a kind of a what I worry about is a terribly stupid cranky undoing fight into us not a big dramatic one it's neither a whimper nor a bang but just sort of a cranky rant that could be our end and is that a laugh line I don't know you guys are pretty dark anyway so what to do about it so here there my characterization of the problem overlaps strongly with a lot of other people's characterizations of the problem mine is perhaps not identical to the problem as described by many others but there's an F overlap that I think we have a shared we meaning many people who hope to change us have a shared sense of what's gone wrong no the first thing I want to say in terms of optimism is Wow is that better than things used to be if I had been giving this talk even a few years ago not long at all ago I would have been giving the talk as a really radical French figure who was saying things that almost nobody accepted who had lost friends over these ideas and who was really kind of surviving on the basis of my technical abilities in my past rather than what I was saying presently because it was so unpopular the last especially since I would say like brexit Trump but also just in general like studies showing the horrible increase in suicides and teen girls that that scale with their social media use all these horrible things that have come out although something that's really different in Silicon Valley there are genuinely substantial movements among the people the companies to try to change their act regulators at least in Europe are starting to get teeth and really look at it seriously the tech companies are trying to find a way to get out of the manipulation game they haven't necessarily succeeded and not all of them are trying but some of them are and it's a different world it's a world with a lot of people who are engaged so now having presented and the problem as I see it it's possible to talk about the solution now a lot of folks feel the solution should be privacy rights the European regulators are really into that we had a major conference on that in Brussels last week where Tim Cook who runs Apple gave a fire-breathing talk that kind of sounded like a talk I might have given at some point in the past I gave a talk there too and I was like wow I've got the radical anymore it's very straight in a way in a way I kind of mourn the loss of radicalness because some part of me likes being the person like at this outer edge and I'm not and it's kind of like oh god I'm supposed to be the radical but anyway I am I think it's great that the Europeans are pushing for privacy the theory behind that is that the more the harder it is for the manipulation machine to get at your data the less it can manipulate and the more maybe there's a chance for sanity there's a peculiar race going on because the societies and year of that support regulation and have and have regulators with teeth which we really don't have much of in the u.s. right now are themselves under siege by these the the cranky political parties who are sometimes called right-wing populist but I think should be just called you know the crank parties and the the cranky parties might bring these societies down so there's a race can the regulator's influence the technology in time to preserve themselves or will the technology destroy their politics before they have a chance it's a really so that's a race going on right now it's quite dramatic and I wouldn't know how to handicap it now the privacy approach is hard because these systems are complicated like if I say okay here's click on this button to consent to using your data for this like I even obviously can't read the thing and even if there's some kind of better regulation supporting it it's just nobody understands that even the companies themselves don't understand their own data they don't understand their own security they don't I mean like this whole thing is beyond all of us nobody's nobody's really doing it that well everybody's having data breaches and discovering suddenly that they were using data they didn't think they were using that's happened repeatedly at Google and Facebook in particular so I've advocated a different approach which is instead of using regulators to talk about privacy get lawyers and accountants to talk about lost value from your data being stolen now I have several reasons for that one is I don't think we'll ever lose our accountants and our lawyers I think they're more persistent than our regulators that's one reason and I'm not going to do lawyer jokes because the whole society has become some mean-spirited I don't like to make jokes about classes of people even lawyers anymore but in your so my best friends are really you know them but anyway let me give you an example that I like to use to explain the economic approach here there's a tool online that I happen to use frequently that I really like which is automatic translation between languages if you want to look at a website in another language or send somebody now you can go online and there at least two companies that do this pretty well now Microsoft and Google can enter your text in one language a usable translation comes out on the other side convenient free great modernity however here's an interesting thing it turns out that languages are alive every single day there's a whole world of public events all of a sudden today I have to be able to talk about the tree of life shooter and you have to know what I mean all of a sudden today I have to be able to talk about the mag a bomber you need to know what I mean so every single day there all of these new reference points that come out lately often horrible ones sometimes once maybe a new music video and a new meme that people like whatever so every single day those of us who help maintain such systems have to scrape meaning steal tens of millions of example phrase translations from people who don't know it's being done to them so there are tens of millions of people who are kind of tricked into somehow translating this phrase or that phrase in Google and Microsoft have to grab these things and incorporate them to update their systems to make them work but at the same time the people who are good at translating are losing their jobs the career prospects for a typical language translator have been decimated meaning their tenth of what they were following exactly the pattern of other information based work that's been destroyed by the everything must be free movement recording musicians investigative journalists crucially photographers all of these people are looking at about a tenth of the career prospects that they used to have that's not to say that everything's bleak all there there are examples in each case of a few people who find their way and this gets to a very interesting technical discussion which is I won't but you get a zipper curve where there are few successful people and then it falls to nothing whereas before you before you had a bell curve but I can if anybody wants to know more about that I can but anyway you have a tiny number of successful people but almost everybody has lost their careers now wouldn't it make more sense if instead of making money by providing free translations in order to get other people who are called advertisers to manipulate the people who need the translations in some sneaky way that they don't understand and make the whole world more cranky and less reality oriented instead of that what if we went to the people providing this phrase translations and we just told them you know if you could just give us the phrase translations we really need then our system would work better and we pay you because then we'd have a better system and then if we went to the people who need translations and say free isn't really quite working because that way we that means we have to get these other people to manipulate you to have a customer but we'll make it really cheap what about a I'm a translation or something like that we work out some kind of a system where the people who provide the translations meet each other because it's a network we can introduce them they form a union they collectively bargained with us for reasonable rates that they can all live put their kids through school and then we get better working translators and yeah you pay a dime you can afford a dime and suddenly everybody's happier no there are a few things about this that are really good in my point of view one is we no longer have these people from the side paying to manipulate people everything's become clear - we have a whole class of people making a living instead of needing to go on the dole instead of saying oh we need this basic income because everybody is worthless 3 we're being honest instead of lying which is a really big deal right now we have to lie because we're not telling the people that were taking their data we're telling them oh your buggy whoops you're worthless but in secret we need you that's a lie and for there's kind of a spiritual thing here where we're telling people honestly when they're still needed like to tell people oh actually you're obsolete the robots taken over your job when it's not true when we still need their data there's something very cruel about that it cuts to some sort of issue of dignity and human Worth and it really bothers me so for all these reasons this seems like a better system to me and sure we'd have to make accommodations for those who can't afford whatever the rate would be for the language translation but we can do that we've almost figured out ways to do that if we're a decent society and we'd be a more decent society because we wouldn't have an economy that's strictly run on making people into so so that's why I advocate the economic approach so I know it's bad form but it can I refer you to paper to read go look up something called blueprint for a better digital society I'm sorry about the title I didn't make it up it's an editor's fault Adi Ignatius it's your fault Adi and it's a Harvard Business Review recently you can find it online very easily blueprint for better digital society and it's the latest version about how to make this thing work and a little bit about how to transition to it so so that's the solution I've been exploring and promoting I think there's room for a lot of solutions another idea is people like the Center for Humane technology which is Tristan Harris in another group called Common Sense Media are trying to educate individuals about how to be more aware of how they are manipulated and how to make slight adjustments to be manipulated a little less worth trying remember it's a sneaky machine the whole industry is based on fooling you so staying ahead of it is gonna be work you can't just do it once and think you're done it'll be a lifetime effort that's why I think you should just quit the things yeah when I say can you please delete all your social media accounts surely one of the first thoughts and all your minds is well that's ridiculous I mean you're not gonna get billions of people to suddenly drop these things there's there's two reasons why you're correct if you have that that that thought one is that you're addicted this is an actual addiction you can't just go to somebody with a gambling addiction and say oh just so you know any more than you can do that if they have a heroin addiction that's not how addiction works you can't just say no it's a prop it's hard addictions hard all of us have addictions none of us are perfect but this particular ones destroying our future it's really bad it's not just personal we hurt each other with this one in an exceptional way so another reason is network effect and that means everybody already has like all their pictures and all their past and all their stuff on these properties that belong to companies like Facebook and for everybody to get off it all it went so they can continue to have connections with each other is a coordination problem that's essentially impossible at scale so that's that's a network effect problem so why am I asking people to do something that can only happen a little and the reason why is even if it only happens a little it's incredibly important so let me let me draw a metaphor to some things that have happened in the past we have in the past had mass addictions that were tied to corrupt commercial motives at a large scale one example is the cigarette industry another example is big alcohol alcoholic beverages I could mention others lead paint is when I bring up in the book now in these cases well actually the lead paint was an addiction thing so I'll leave I'll leave out lead paint so let's just talk about cigarettes and in the case of cigarettes when I was growing up it was almost impossible to challenge cigarettes I you know like cigarettes were manly they were cool if you were on the red side of America they were the cowboy thing if you were on the blue side they were the cool beatnik thing everybody had a cigarette and you just couldn't be cool without your cigarette but enough people finally realized that they could get out from under it that at least it allowed a conversation the addict will defend it if you talk to somebody who's really addicted to cigarettes it's very hard for them to really get a clear view of what the cigarette means to society what it means to have cigarette in public spaces there was a time in this room would have been filled with cigarette smoke and we would have been gradually killing the students who were attending I think I'm coughing in sympathy with remembering what that was like because it was really horrible alcohol Mothers Against Drunk Driving was or drunk drivers I forget which it is has been one of the most effective political organizations they changed laws they changed awareness they changed outcomes and saved an enormous number of lives despite the fact that once again alcohol is cool it's supposed to be cool to drink at a frat party it supposed to be cool to drink at your fancy restaurant everybody loves drinking and there's this whole world event of advertising liquor we found a reasonable compromise in both cases we don't throw people who drink or smoke cigarettes in jail like we've done for marijuana for years instead we came up with a reasonable policy don't do it in public don't do it behind the wheel it worked that was only possible because we had enough people who were outside of the addiction system have a conversation in this case we don't have that in this case all the journalists who should be helping us are addicted to Twitter and making fools of themselves if you're a journalist in this room you know I'm telling the truth the same for politicians same for public figures celebrities who might be helpful we need to create just a space to have a conversation outside of the addiction system now you might be thinking oh my god I'll destroy my life if I'm not on these things I don't think it's true I think if you actually drop these things you suddenly discover you can have any life you want I'm not claiming that I'm the most successful writer or public speaker but I'm pretty successful I have best-selling books I get around I you know you hired me to come talk to you and I've never had an account on any of these things and you could say oh but you're an exception in this way well I mean how much of an exception can I be I've plenty of points against me I'm like this weirdo and and I still know seriously you know I mean I still can do it if I can do it probably other people can do it too I just don't I think that there's this illusion that your whole life like they'll be you'll just be erased if you're not on these things but that illusion is exactly part of the problem that's that's exactly part of this weird existential insecure need for attention at any cost bizarre personality dysfunction that's destroying us just give it a rest now here's what I would say there was a time it's when if you were young especially one of the priorities that you felt in your life was to know yourself and the only way to know yourself is to test yourself and the way you test yourself is maybe go trekking in the Himalayas or something I used to hitchhike into central Mexico when I was really young just a really young teenager and that's how I tested myself these days I think the the similar idea would be quitting your social media and really deleting it like you can't you can't like quit Facebook and keep Instagram that's you have to actually delete the whole thing and and then it doesn't mean you're doing it for your whole life delete everything and then stay off stuff for six months okay if you're young you can afford it it will not kill you and then after six months you will have learned and then you make a decision in my opinion you should not harm your life for the sake of the ideas I've talked about today if it's really true that your career will be better or whatever through using these things then you need to follow your truth and do what makes you succeed and if it's really true that being a serf too stupid Silicon Valley giant is the thing that helps your career okay but you have to be the one making that decision and if you haven't tested yourself you don't have standing to even know so I'm not telling you what's right for you but I demand that you discover what's right for you that I think is a fair demand given the stakes and with that cheerful closing I will call it a tie [Applause] [Music] so we have is the ISM icon so do we have the question set people well we were gonna have cards I don't know if any cards have made their way here's a card cards okay I'm actually an unclear on how this whole thing works okay well this is alright so normally I would get a bunch of cards but I but I haven't that hasn't happened yet okay lately I've noticed that I was getting progressively more cranky that's now a technical term I think you've introduced along with virtual reality cranky from a lack of sleep because of the excessive blue light given off by screens ah have you factored this effect into your theory oh yeah well there's the time and stuff like that there's more as soon as soon as I put blue filters on my screens I got a lot less cranky okay there the problem of blue light keeping you up and those are all real problems and in fact you might want to just turn colour off on your computer definitely turn colour off on your phone and I'll seriously so you don't need it for most things I have I have color I use a phone but I definitely off and like make those changes if you know if you notice something like that yeah you can right you can turn off the blue light in your computer you can go into a setting and you know the best way to do it go to the visual accessibility settings because they have these high contrast settings for people who have trouble focusing and they get rid of color as we come stark contrast as an example oh for God's sakes I have to enter this - I was going to show you what it looks like but I'm not going to bother with the code anyway you just you can do it every major platform has this ability it's really that and you should do it go to Common Sense Media org or to Center for humane technologies website and both of them have advice on how to do things like this and another thing is um both I'm pretty sure both Windows and Mac if it's a computer have ways to make the blue light go away as the evening approaches there's like this kind of stuff this is real stuff and you should pay attention to it and the technology should serve you and not drive you crazy but I do have to say this is not an existential threat this is this is at the level of too much sugar and breakfast cereals or something like that it is actually a real issue it's it's it does have an effect on the health of the population but it's not going to destroy us that's other stuff I'm talking about is at another level okay so rather than the cards do we have cards we do okay great let's give some cards is that your card oh okay great okay here's my card isn't there a design problem for publishing online if you know who's pointing at you how is that related to the problem Allen turning faced touring it says turning he hatched the concept of a machine like personality isn't that too software what listening and compassion is to human communication yeah it's a kind of interesting question to me when I read Turing's final notes that the Turing test comes up twice it comes up in a little monograph he wrote and it comes up in a sort of a little note there's two statements of it and in both of them to me reading them there's just this profound sadness I feel like this is this person who's just screaming out so some of you might I don't know there's a whole history to this thing that what trinket is he created a metaphor oh boy let me try to do this as fast as I can Turing did as much as anybody to defeat the Nazis in World War two by breaking using one of the first computers that ever existed to break a Nazi secret code called enigma and he he was considered a great war hero however he lived an identity that was illegal at that time which is that he was gay and he was forced by the British government after the war to accept the bizarre crack treatment for being gay which was to overdose on female sexual hormones with this bizarre idea that female hormones would balance his over sex sickness which was supposed to be the gay it's like so stupid it's hard to even repeat it and he started developing female physiological characteristics as a result of that treatment and it he committed suicide by a sort of a weird political thing where he laced an apple with cyanide and ate it next to the first computer sort of anti Eve or something and he was a very brilliant and poetic man and in the final couple of weeks of his life he came up with this idea of repurposing an old Victorian parlor game that used to be this thing we'd have a man and a woman behind a curtain or a screen of some kind and all they could do is pass little messages to a judge and the judge would have to tell who's the man and who's the woman and each of them might be trying to fool the judge which is kind of a weird if you think about it the Victorians were pretty kinky and bizarre and and so what you're doing is as with behaviorism and as for the Internet you're slicing away all of these factors and just turning it into like this limited stream of information so it's kind of like tweeting or something and so what Turing said is what if you got rid of the woman and you had a man in a computer and the judge couldn't tell them apart wouldn't then finally you have to admit that the computer should be given rights and be given stature and be treated and when you read it I don't the way I read it is it's this person saying oh my god I figured out how to save the world from these people who wanted to destroy everybody based on being of the wrong identity these people who wanted to kill not only gays but of course Jews and Gypsies and and and black people and these horrible people and I came up with this way of defeating them and now you're destroying me for who I am and I feel like there's this kind of astonishing sadness in it and the way it's the way turns and so that was the birth of the idea of artificial intelligence and I feel like the way it's remembered is completely unlike what it's like to read the original you know I feel like if you look at the have you ever read the original Turing because if you read the original Turing I mean it's like it's intense you know here's this person who's being tortured to death it's like it's not some kind of nerdy thing at all it's it's a it's a difficult it's difficult to read the documents and I think it was like this crazy I think he knew he was about to die and I think he was reaching out for some sort of a fantasy of what kind of a thing what would it take for people to not be cruel what would it take and I think in this very dark moment he thought maybe giving up humanity entirely and will just maybe if we're just machines maybe we won't do this to ourselves and the thing about that of course is we've turned ourselves sort of into machines because we've all kind of acting like machines to be able to use this stuff you're all sitting there all day entering your like little codes to get online that you're sort of turning into machines in practice and yet we've just become more and more curl like that that's the the ultimate irony is that it didn't help so that's my take on it and this idea that hey I is some could be some form of compassion I think it's kind of I think it's really just a way of stealing data from people who should be paid to translate AI is theft to paraphrase anyway okay we we a I is just a way look all all we can do with computers ever look to be a good technologist you have to believe that people are sort of mystically better than machines otherwise you end up with gobbledygook and nonsense you can't design for machines so AI has to be understood as a channel for taking data from one person to help another person I take I take the data from the translators and I apply it through a machine learning scheme or some kind of scheme and I can get translations that help people in a better way that I could without that scheme in between which is wonderful so it's technology to help people connect in a way that's more helpful if you understand AI that way you elevate people and you don't confuse yourself okay yeah we we we don't have a lot of time and we have a lot of great questions so some questions are not going to be able to be answered now although I want to mention that there will be a book signing and book purchasing outside after the event is over there'll be two tables please if you want to ask me long quest you can't go up through it come up to me and ask like some open-ended giant question I'm signing your book that were taken out like by that you really can't do that by a book the people who are selling ebooks have asked that you buy a book first before you have it signed and that note I'll segue into there's a couple questions that are connected to this about your market solution arguably the mess we're in now comes from the monopolistic and manipulative tendencies inherent in markets given that the world has never known pure markets what would keep this one pure oh it's not going to be pure it's going to be annoying and unfair and horrible but the thing about it is it won't be extent existentially horrible the thing about market so what I would I believe about economic philosophies is there's never been one that's worked out in practice and instead just asked with moral philosophies and theories of how we learn and many many other areas where we're trying to deal with very complex systems it's not so much that we can seek the perfect answer but we have to trade off between partial answers so to me there's never been a peer market there's never been and I don't think there ever could be but I think what you can do is you can get a balance this was the the Keynesian approach to economics I think is very wise you get you you you get a balance between reasonable oversight and in a reasonably unfettered market and they'll go through cycle for the market will need help and you just eat trade off you trade off and I think that that's that's the only path we have I think being eyed and being an ideologue for any solution to a highly complicated problem is always wrong okay it's just too more than and there's a couple like this as well what about the connection force of social media eg for the feminist movement like me to these online communities raise awareness and create supportive communities and then many people who rely on social media for community because of the demands of capitalist jobs yeah yeah it's just that's all true except that backfires and the backfires worse than the original so like what happened the it just keeps on happening I mean like before me too there were there was a problem of diversity in the gaming world and a few women in gaming just wanted to be able to say one or two things and not be totally invisible and and then the result of that was this for Asia's thing called gamergate that was just this total never shut up totally wipe everybody else out totally make it everything horrible movement and then me too has spawned this this other thing that's still rising which is the in sells and the proud boys and all this stuff and the problem is that in these open systems at first your experience of finding mutual support and creating social changes as authentic its real it's just that there's this machine you're not thinking about behind the scenes that's using the fuel you're providing in the form of the data to irritate these other people because it gets even more of a rise from them and you're creating this other thing that's even more powerful that's horrible even though it wasn't your intent and that's the thing that keeps on happening over and over again it doesn't invalidate the validity of the good stuff that happens first it's just that it always backfires well not always but typically and you end up you end up being slammed and you don't even like one of the things that's really bad about it is that it's you know it seems like it's just the fault of the creeps you come up where it's actually kind of more the fault of the algorithms that introduced the creeps to each other and then got them excited in this endless cycle of using your good intentions to irritate the worst people so I mean I know the thing is it's true black lives matter was great I think I mean I think it's wonderful and yet the reaction to it was horrible and of a higher magnitude and I just think we have to find unfortunately until we can get rid of the advertising model and the giant manipulation machine every time you use the big platforms for any kind of positive social effect it'll backfire and destroy you and it's it's a fool's game even though it's valid at first in the long term it's a fool's game okay this I don't like saying that I hate saying that it breaks my heart this is the last question and it's existential wanna I'll combine the two two questions here seeing how pernicious social media has become by being hijacked toward bummer and you know bummer is another technical term you using yeah there's a wonderful writer on cyber things I'm sherry Turkle and she read my book and she said oh I love this book but there's just too much touching it and the thing because it there's like bummer and there's a cat's behind on the cover stuff and I the problem is I married a woman who likes butt jokes and I just can't I don't know some of they just come I don't know anyway okay so how to how to guard against an immersive technology like virtual reality becoming even more insidiously bummer and then how do you know what is real okay oh well all right those are small questions so the first one I mean I think the way to keep fort reality vert reality could be super hyper creepy I wrote a book about vert reality that we have mentions called dawn of the new everything I don't know if they'll have it up front or not but I talked a lot about that issue so virtuality could potentially be creepy I think the way to tell whether something's getting creepy is whether there's a business model for creepiness so if the way it's making money is that there's somebody to the side who thinks they can sneakily alter you or manipulate you that's the creepy engine if there isn't that person if there isn't that business going on it's less likely to be creepy I think this is actually that's actually a pretty simple question to answer I think it boils down to incentives I think incentives run the world as much or more than anything else as far as this question of how to be how do you know what's real the answer is imperfect what you do is you struggle for it you struggle to do scientific experiments to publish you have to always recognize you can fool yourself you have to recognize that whole communities of people can fool themselves and you just struggle and struggle and struggle and you gradually start to form a little island in a sea of mystery in which you never have total confidence what you start to have a little confidence so there are some things that we can be confident of now the earth is round not online but do we know it in an absolute absolute sense no you can never know reality absolutely but you can know it pretty well and so in order to talk about reality you have to be used you have to get used to near perfection that is never actual perfection and if you're not comfortable with that concept you have no hope of getting to reality because that's the nature of reality reality is not something you ever know absolutely and in fact just to be clear I in one of my books I defined reality is the thing that can be never that can never be measured exactly it's the thing that can never be simulated accurately it's the thing that can never be described to perfection that is reality but at this because the simulation can be described to perfection I can describe to you a video game world or a virtual world to perfection I can't do that with reality and the the thing is though that we can't demand absolute knowledge in order to have any knowledge at all or else we make ourselves it's genuine fools we have to be able to accept that we can have better knowledge than other knowledge it's all an incremental sort of eternal improvement project so the people who demand absolutely proof of climate change or fools but they're interesting like I mean some of you might have read there was a good history published this week about the history of the reading wars about how we learn reading and there's this community of people who've just been absolutely unable to accept a load of scientific evidence about how to teach kids to read effectively because of an ideology and they're sincere and it's like people it's really really hard accepting reality is your life's work it's really really really hard it's it's not it doesn't come naturally necessarily it's a discipline thank you all right [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: UC Santa Cruz Arts, Lectures, and Entertainment

Views: 66,783

Rating: 4.8865509 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: KNOlqzMd2Zw

Length: 106min 9sec (6369 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MarshallMarks]

His book You Are Not A Gadget is a great read on data/AI/transhumanism etc.

[u/insaneintheblain]

Make a new network and only invite real people

[u/xXSoulPatchXx]

I am only an hour in and can say this is one of the more enlightening things I have seen recently. There is so much to process and think about. Thank you for sharing.

[u/sandtrout56]

Well that was two hours I didn’t know I wanted to spend. Great talk, and a couple of great book recommendations.

[u/heyfrank25]

Someone should call the Pied Piper

[u/El_Dubious_Mung]

I haven't watched this lecture, but I watched another of his on the subject. I'm assuming he discusses a subscription model for the internet.

I think it's interesting, but I think it would end up being more detrimental than the ad-based model. You'd end up with a netflix problem. I have netflix, I get a lot of content from it, so why would I want another streaming service? Maybe I'll get one or two more, but not 5, 10, 100 streaming services.

The same would happen with more general sites if they all went to a subscription model. We would stop exploring. Sites like reddit will become the new netflix, as people look for the most bang for their buck.

Some sites we don't visit regularly. They're interesting, but not monthly payment interesting. We don't want them to die, but it'd be hard to justify an extra payment. Would you pay to visit a site once a month? Less? Some of these sites survive because they get random visitors who just pop in, look around, and then leave. What if you had to pay to just pop in for a quick look? Think of how much we bitch about paywalls on news sites.

There's also options like the donation model, which works great for little sites, but terrible for larger sites, such as wikipedia.

I could see Lanier's ideas working, just not universally. It should be added to the internet toolkit.

[u/GI_X_JACK]

From futurology, there are some pretty glaring problems with this speech and its more pander and pop history than a grounded critique. Not that Silicone Valley or big tech is good, but its pretty obvious the author doesn't mean "actual silicon valley", but "everyone who works in tech" combined with "everyone who's involved in new media that wasn't previously sanctioned by old media".

There a lot of dishonesty here, both stating the internet protocols were extensible for future capitals, being originally written by capitalists. That Al Gore started public funding to the internet, or the internet was originally made by corporations or even startups or silicone valley. This at best is slightly dishonest, and an honest take is that its a flat out lie.

The internet, as we all know started as a DARPA project, with, explicit government funding, and most of the coding was done at universities. Specifically, the famous TCP/IP stack that everyone used for decades being written by a young Bill Joy, at the time a graduate student at University of California at Berkley. But again, he didn't actually do anything.

Yes, Al Gore worked on legislation in the for expanding ARPANET. This is not the same as actually writing it or doing the work. Even still as a lot of the people doing the labor were very independent minded and had their own goals. The internet evolved its own communities independent of official owners.

Probably most infuriating is that he mentions Richard Stallman and "Free Software" as a forerunner to Silicon Valley. Probably exact opposite of everything the man has ever said. But to Jaron it doesn't matter. The real aim of this isn't taking aim at Silicon Valley, its taking aim at new media pandering to the old media and people who lost out big when the internet came around. These people every bit abusive and terrible in their own day as tech giants are now. If he listened to that same Richard in the 80s, we would have avoided most of the problems.

The Richard Stallman reference becomes most infuriating, not because Richard is one of the few NOT to sell the fuck out to Silicon Valley UNLIKE many of his peers from the 70s hacker scene, but an early critic of such scene. He was the first to raise the flag on many issues that Jarod now talks about. Way back in the 80s, but no one believed him. check out /r/stallmanwasright. Not to say Stallman doesn't have his own issues, but, he also has his merits.

The pander about knowing Trump and Andy Warhol, and referencing not historical documents or research but previous pop culture icons should be a tell this man has no honest intent. Jarod questions internet celebrities, at the same time name dropping previous celebrities without question or issue.

The issue in tech, seems to be the same issue in the rest of the US. When there are multiple options presented on the table for development, the one that generates the most amount of money always gets considered, and critics get ignored. Ethics only get considered later after the investors have gotten their fill. Almost all the complaints with Silicon Valley were brought up by techies for decades and where systematically shut down for being communists, haters, anti-business or whatever.

Only after did it finally bite the investors in the ass and problems got too big to ignore did they finally reconize them. Then its "blame the techies", not that "we only ever looked to the internet as a fountain of money, and now we need to blame soomeone when it didn't work out"

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Oh same guy as

>In his book You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Lanier criticizes what he perceives as the hive mind of Web 2.0 (wisdom of the crowd) and describes the open source and open content expropriation of intellectual production as a form of "Digital Maoism"

Red baiting much? This should be a big enough red flag to discredit him. Given his own record, its safe to say that Jarod is the crazy techie they warned you about.

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edit: Jarod gives off pretty weird fashy vibes.